Happy birthday to us

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I’m not sure if anyone outside of our offices pays much attention to our issue or volume numbers, but this week’s edition is Issue 1 of Vol. 26. That means this newspaper is now 25 years old. That’s not quite old enough to be a storied institution, but it’s probably about 23 years longer than many skeptics in the valley expected when the paper launched.

I was a reader of the paper long before I was a writer or an editor. I remember reading Bob Grimm’s movie reviews, D. Brian Burghart’s reporting, and Bruce Van Dyke’s ruminations long before I met and befriended any of them, and I loved feeling like I was encountering new, local versions of the alternative media journalists from a slightly earlier generation, like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs , whom I was also discovering, reading and loving at that time.

I’ve always aspired for our paper to have the best, most entertaining writing possible, a quality of material that rivals national publications despite the hyper-local focus of our coverage.

Alternative newspapers, like ours, exist in a weird gray area: We’re too loose, subjective, opinionated and messy to really fit in with traditional old-media daily newspapers, but we’re also too grounded, too factual and too material to be simple figments of the imaginative internet. We’re the misfit middle child. The older generation thinks we’re a bunch of stoner slackers, and the kids think it’s weird that we put our thoughts on paper instead of in YouTube videos.

But I love existing in that gray area—one foot in traditional media, and the other foot in the digital chaos of social media and other online content. I like to pick and choose the best of both worlds. But our real world is, has been and will continue to be: Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, Truckee and the surrounding communities.

It’s an honor to serve this region, and thank you for reading our little fishwrap rag.